I often write short stories or poems. It's about a variety of subjects, but today I felt an impulse to write the following. I thought I shared it here, maybe some people will like it or enjoy it, who knows...

(I actually stated writing it as a story about pain and fear because I felt pain in my body, but it quickly became a story about love). Here it goes:

Brief encounters with Love

My pain is always accompanied by fear. It’s like the two team up and take over my body, hijack it surreptitiously, stealthily. Fear, the unwelcomed visitor extends to take over me, it engulfs everything, becomes my stomach, my liver, my feet, my lips, until finally it becomes me. Until finally my mind is fear and then I am fear. I become fear; and then I am full of despair.

And so it goes. Me and fear, a relationship that should have never been.

I wonder if it happens so with love. I experienced true love only once. Love is a rare visitor but a welcomed visitor.

That day, the day when I became love that is, I was in my room folding and ironing my clothes. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was lazily passing time. Suddenly, I felt it and it took a moment to recognize it for what is. It was like one of those rare astronomical events that you see every few decades: it happens and you know it did, but it’s so hard to grasp, to touch, to remember, that it is as if it never did happen. I wish I could have taken a photograph of love, I wonder what that would entail.

It took over my body bit by bit. First a pleasant anticipation. A quiet smile. My mind a nurturing cup emptied by what it deemed unnecessary. Light was coming through my windows graciously touching the small plant I placed on the windowsill. That’s how I felt love: it came like the light touching the plant. As far as it was concerned, my mind was uncharted territory, rusty dark old prison cellar. But it made it somehow!

Everything around me had a quiet beauty. When I looked at the table, the clothes, the dresser, the plant, it was as if I saw them for the first time. I felt I was in love with everything around me. My breath was steady and from deep in my belly. I kept having thoughts about the light in the room, the lightness of my body, the slow steam that came from the iron on the table. These thoughts were like little bundles of energy playing around in my mind. Hello, thought! I am here. You are there. How lovely to meet you.

I saw then so clearly that this love I felt was all-encompassing. It was so simple, so simple it had no object. And it didn’t need to. It was love for me, love for you, love for my mother, love for the plant, love for the stranger, love for the planet, love for… All the love I felt before, or thought I felt (I was not so sure what love was anymore, anyway) was almost in preparation for this unlikely event I felt that day. And the pain too. All the fear, the despair that I felt - that I would ever feel - was annulled, redeemed by this moment in time as if all the suffering in the world can be erased forever in one instant. One instant of life erases all death.

For a brief moment of time that lazy Saturday afternoon I had become love. I had united forces with something greater than me. As if Love was flying above Earth and saw my vulnerable insignificant self and thought of making it a temple for a few moments. It thought of inhabiting my body so that I could see what it meant to be Love.

“Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still”